Best 16 quotes of Peter Porter on MyQuotes

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

A professional is one who believes he has invented breathing.

I am moving deeper into my own brain.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

In the New World, happiness is enforced.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast.

Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

Somewhere at the heart of the universe sounds the true mystic note: Me.

We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop 's tongs - we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later.